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The Best Music in Film
Jocelyn Pook
(Worked on soundtracks for several Derek Jarman films and composed the music for Eyes Wide Shut and L'emploi du temps)
- S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?
- "Michael Nyman's music for The Draughtman's Contract (1982) blew me away when I first saw the film. At that time it was so unusual to use music in that way, as a separate, distinctive, driving voice. Likewise Stanley Kubrick's bold use of music in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I also like film music with memorable tunes that you're humming for days later - Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), music for Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968), Love Story (1970) - still lodged in the brain 25 years later... and Badalamenti's music for Twin Peaks was wonderfully atmospheric. I think Björk's score for Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (2000) is brilliant and original in the way it uses various found sounds from the scenes (clunking factory machinery, trains etc) to drive the music. Talking of trains, I also enjoyed the quirkiness of Benjamin Britten's score for Night Mail (1936). More recently, my current favourite is the music for the wonderful Belleville Rendez-Vous (2003). Innovative and delightful, with memorable musical moments such as the four elderly ladies making their 'sonata for kitchen utensils and fridge'. It's a scandal that it didn't win the Oscar this year for best soundtrack!"
- S&S: In what ways does music best enhance a film?
- "I think music best enhances a film when it has its own distinctive voice, having its own course, its own comment, its own rhythm - when it acts as another layer which embodies something of the atmospheres, tones, emotional undercurrents and essence of the film, rather than simply underlining the obvious."
- S&S: Which film either has music that you wished you'd written or is one you would like to rescore and why?
- "Blight (1997) was made in collaboration with the film maker John Smith for the BBC series Sound On Film, where a composer and film maker collaborate to make a 'music film'. Because we were working together from the outset, musical, visual and conceptual ideas evolved organically in a way I've rarely experienced, which made it quite an exhilarating process, and which I think took us both in unexpected directions. Blight revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition. The film is constructed from images and sounds of demolition and road building in conjunction with the spoken words of residents - the musical qualities of the speech fragments and natural sounds form the basis of the score. One sequence that seems to have quite an emotional impact is 'Tango with Corrugated Iron', which uses the percussive sounds of corrugated iron recorded on site, with voices, strings and whizzing cars, and which has since also become a concert piece in its own right."